Next story in Space

Four of the eight
new NASA astronaut candidates announced Monday (June 17) are
women, representing the highest percentage of female trainees
chosen for any class in history.

The new astronauts were named publicly a day before the 30th
anniversary of Sally Ride's first flight aboard the space shuttle
Challenger that launched her into history as the first American
woman to fly into space. The announcement also comes on the heels
of the 50th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut
Valentina Tereshkova's historic spaceflight in 1963 that made
her the first women to fly into space. [ Photos:
Meet NASA's 2013 Astronaut Class ]

The women selected for training in the new class were not chosen
because of their gender, said Janet Kavandi, NASA's director of
flight crew operations at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"We never determine how many people of each gender we're going to
take, but these were the most qualified people of the ones that
we interviewed," Kavandi said during a Google+ Hangout held in
honor of the new class. "They earned every bit the right to be
there."

Christina Hammock, Nicole Mann, Anne McClain and Jessica Meir
will be the newest female trainees to enter the elite group
housed at the Texas space center.

"I really strongly believe in both the practical aspects of the
research being conducted, as well as the larger picture of the
human spaceflight program bringing us forward as a human race and
uniting us in exploring the universe," said Hammock, who
currently serves as National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration station chief in American Samoa.

McClain and Mann both have experience as pilots at the U.S. Naval
Test Pilot School and the U.S. Naval Air Station.

Meir holds a doctorate from the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography and is an assistant professor of anesthesia at
Harvard Medical School.

"All the women candidates … have tremendous qualifications and
certainly earned the right to be there, so I'm glad," Kavandi
said. "I'm happy that it turned out that way, but we didn't go
out intentionally seeking that when we started out."

Not including the new crop of potential astronauts, 12 of the 49
active NASA astronauts are women.

The new class — rounded out by Josh Cassada, Victor Glover, Tyler
Hague and Andrew Morgan — could be the first group of astronauts
to pilot the Orion spacecraft, fly to an asteroid and even land
on Mars, according to NASA officials.

Ride launched into orbit for the first time on June 18, 1983. She
succumbed to pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012, and later this
year, President Barack Obama will award her with a posthumous
Medal of Freedom.